Making a good salad is a special skill that stands apart from other cooking tasks–baking and grilling, deep frying and soup making. That balance of oil and acid against the delicate leaves that can wilt or taste bitter or too watery takes a specific finesse.

Salad has been a marital issue for me. My husband and I have very different approaches and desires . . . for what we want out of a salad. How much “stuff” in it and what to put on it. There was a man in his neighborhood when he was a child that made the best salads, he told me, and he would have it at neighborhood events. There were all kinds of things in it, lots of stuff. The way he tells it (he’s an Irish story teller), there was this man standing at a corner with a giant bowl and children running from all directions to have this salad, shouting, screaming, thrilled.

Now, our salad differences look like this: if I make the salad, there are no onions but lots of those little sweet peppers and carrots sliced like coins. If he has some, he chops up onions to add to his and then takes little scissors and cuts everything in his bowl smaller, snip, snip. When he makes the salad, onion obviously is included and the carrots are shaved into the salad with a peeler, thin and long delicate slices. I eat it straight up when he makes it, because I’m no fool and luxuriate in a meal someone else has cooked.

My mom makes the best salads of anyone in the whole world. Mine will never be as good as hers, even if I do exactly as she tells me. I can make a decent salad, and with a recipe in front of me, maybe even great, but not like some I know who have a special gift, a confidence and just the right touch that works at least four dinners a week.

She’ll tell you, if you ask her, how to make it: drizzling olive oil over the lettuce first to coat, mixing with your hands as you check to see if each leaf is about right before you add some kind of acid. That layer of oil–my mind stays with this as she moves on to explain the rest. I get lost right there and stop listening, enjoying this protection and layer of oil on leaf.

It took me approximately eight years to treat the sliding hollow core doors to our coat closet in our new front entryway. The deal with our builder when we did our renovation was I’d take care of the painting. I’ve handled the walls and trim over time (ok, a long time), but we still have three, well, now two, unfinished hollow core doors. They’ve intimidated me and I know friends and family keep visiting and wondering if we’ll ever finish these dry, bare doors.

Like little deserts in my house on leaving and returning, dry pale sheets of wood, thirsty and waiting, they’re one of those unfinished things I’m sure we all have somewhere in our lives. But yesterday, it was time. I finally finished them with some Danish oil, coating them with an old, soft, cloth diaper that my mother had hand sewn for my oldest sister who was born in 1958. I have several of them I use as rags (they’re very clean now!)

It was intimidating. It took me years. It wasn’t a natural, easy thing for me. I’m not being self-deprecating. There are Herculean tasks I have no problem with: I’ve moved a Japanese maple tree around our yard twice since we’ve lived here and it’s survived: that’s my thing, digging giant holes, understanding what a plant needs, mixing the dirt with compost. I’m there. I love it.

But oiling something is a gift, a risk, suitable to a special type of priestess, as in ancient times, anointing, adorning with honor and love. I’m thankful for the salad makers.